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On Tuesday I was in a band with Elvis Lucky fora peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich and wearing a sequined juo for In that case, Ms Lottie, the wardrobe lady, would have decked e headpiece, a sheer body stocking, and sequined pasties over my nipples Everybody in the band was supposed to ed-out Elvis on death’s door in Vegas, his fiddle player would have been a bare-breasted showgirl

And to think: otten me this afternoon job If I’d had to wear an outfit like that, it would have served the rest of ht

Fortunately, I’d been hired as a fiddle player to fill out tribute bands in Nashville, not Vegas The bandleader forrockabilly Elvis fro a broad-shouldered suit with a skinny tie and wing-tip shoes Ms Lottie had an honest-to-God circle skirt for ined when she’d first said “Elvis,” I was relieved The skirt ay too big, though She had to fold darts into the waistband and sew me into it

Then she eyedshort black sections with her carefully h the rhinestone-fraoing to feel warirls, I can pile up their hair and pull off an Audrey Hepburn, but yours isn’t long enough” She pinned a redheaded ponytail wig onto my head

Ms Lottie also made me wash off mythis because the casting coe of the band wanted me to look tasteful She ay too polite to be baited into adh She said the company wanted me to look “period,” with my makeup redone in soft tones that played up racious bullshit) With a chiffon scarf knotted around my neck above the starched white collar of h still sore froht I went out to meet Elvis

His singing voice and guitar picking were tolerable He i pretty well, too, but he was ten years too old to be Elvis in his twenties I wondered what he was doing here in theat his real job? This gig sure wasn’t paying his rent Usually people figured that out by his age

The other guitar player rounding out our trio was an elderly man I’d already met, Mr Crabtree I would never know all the professional musicians in Nashville because there was a constant influx of new ones trying to h that I’d encountered Mr Crabtree over and over He was also randdad et a job for his poker buddy and his screwed-up granddaughter

I hadn’t played in a wandering band of minstrels like this before, but I wasn’t nervous I ell trained in ju in with no rehearsal My parents had dragged rass festival in the country for as long as I could re e with her I didn’t always knoho the adult musicians were at the festivals, but ht turn out to be Reba McEntire about to discover Julie and me and propel us to the fa lives Yes yes yes!

Besides being an old hand (or hack) onstage, I knew just about every song there was The ones I didn’twell, there were basically three chords in all of popular music—major one, asp!) crazy-ass et everybody titillated The solo break ca The fiddle took a solo first, guitar second I always knehat key ere in I could predict where theAnyway, the audience didn’t notice mistakes They noticed hesitation

Or would they? I’d been told that so with a band to a local shop’s grand opening or car dealership’s sale extravaganza Today ere staying right here in the vast shopping immick to attract custo suit for the sulance

But a gig was a gig, and I would do my best I played a few chords with Elvis and Mr Crabtree outside Foot Locker to ht into one rockabilly song after another As I’d predicted, it was a lot like being onstage with Soht Be Reba McEntire but Wasn’t I took the melody in the intro, then backed out and played easy staccato chords on the upbeat while Elvis sang and swayed his pelvis and hopped around on the industrial tile floor In the chorus, Mr Crabtree sang the lower har the second verse, I went back to staccato chords, and I added a lilting string line in the third verse for variety We sounded like we’d been playing together for years Musicians and their instru blocks in a song, with no soul at all

I hadn’t allowed myself to think too hard about it, but I realized now that I’d hoped playing with other people again would lift me out of the funk where I’d spent the past year Instead, I was going in the opposite direction, backing farther into ain But without Julie, the one

If she were here, I would glance over at her when she e to keep fro up at her We would roll our eyes at the questionable fashion choices of the custouy who see unprofessional After she storry, our dad would buy us an ice cream as a consolation prize Between bites ould tell hih with us and recount so in a Knoxville biker bar in the early 1990s

I had thought I , but it was my family Ifor me now

Of course, I had no ties to the real world anyic epiphany Elvis and Mr Crabtree rocked on blissfully, oblivious to the fact that, during their fun rockabilly beat,for the umpteenth time The salesmen dressed like referees came out of Foot Locker to stare at us

A couple of girls I’d seen at school slipped out of the salon next door, showing each other their freshly painted nails I didmy chin in place on irl everyone vaguely knew—didn’t she have a younger sister as about to become famous?—and nobody was friends with I was afraid they would text everybody in their contact lists that they’d seenhis friends here to sneer at irls never stopped for our ht as well have been a mannequin in theat Abercrombie

It o thirty on a Tuesday, a dead ti we , we set up camp between Victoria’s Secret and Sephora and played a couple more tunes This tiave us a s of applause They heard happiness in our music where I didn’t